


fools in a spiral

by Memelock



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, hilda dorothea claude ingrid felix leonie also mentioned, oh shit ashe and marianne mentioned too, there's a linhardt cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Memelock/pseuds/Memelock
Summary: Five times Sylvain sleeps on the couch + one time he doesn’t.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 10
Kudos: 62





	fools in a spiral

**Author's Note:**

> me: sylvain and felix please release your death grip on me.  
> felix: okay  
> sylvain: no ❤️
> 
> heads up there is some very minor discussion of eye trauma, not at all graphic, and i touch on some of the impacts of something like that. it is very light and addressed minimally but if you are sensitive to that sort of topic you might want to steer clear! i also allude lightly, in no detail, to miklan’s treatment of sylvain as children, and the opening vignette deals with glenn’s death.
> 
> title is from “my body” by young the giant. i don’t know how to explain it to you but it’s a dimivain joint.

By the time Sylvain is fifteen, he knows the rounded and uncomfortable molding of the arm of a couch against the back of his neck well enough not to be surprised when he settles in against it, when the weight of his spine on his nerves sows the seeds of pressure and numbness. Dimitri and Felix are the way they have been for a month, split like a festering wound in the daylight, unable to sleep anywhere but next to each other in Glenn’s old bed once the sun dips below the horizon. Dimitri has his own room in the silent and sprawling Fraldarius house, but it goes unused unless the old son and the new are studying for different tests the next day, practicing different extracurriculars, pretending in different ways to be whole and unaffected.

Sylvain knows better, but he also knows better than to say anything, so he settles in silence on the couch that older, cooler Glenn still has memorialized in his bedroom. Glenn’s bed is big enough for two but no more, and when Glenn was demonstrably more popular than, say, Felix with his three total friends, Rodrigue had reluctantly agreed to provide the additional furniture. Felix, as usual, is turned to face the wall, farthest from Sylvain and his aching neck, halfway to the oppressive sleep of the weary, but all that reaches Sylvain’s ears where they listen for any distraction is Dimitri’s breathing, pointed right at the ceiling, a little too measured. Sylvain rolls over, crushing his body down farther to snake his head down onto the cushion of his own arm.

“You awake?” he asks, carefully not using a name. Felix won’t want to talk, never wants to talk unless you get him alone and worn down, so it’s like chumming the waters. Dimitri glances over. His eyes are blue, bright enough to catch the moonlight filtering through the open window. The breeze that blows in is sea-salty and damp but it’s cooler than the air in the house. “Hey.”

“Hello,” Dimitri replies. His voice is quiet. He doesn’t move from the bed to make it easier for them to hear each other, but he does shift so his body in addition to his gaze is turned to Sylvain. He’s thirteen, Sylvain remembers. Thirteen with a dead family and Felix for a best friend, which is complicated at best — high highs and low, very low, lows. He nearly winces, but instead he grins.

“Ingrid’s coming over tomorrow,” he says. “Are you excited to see her?”

“Of course,” Dimitri replies. He’s not rising to the bait, the tantalizing subject that all the boys their age spend endless time on: girls. Ingrid is a girl. Not to Sylvain, of course, to him she’s just another body with light hair and light eyes and the patience to spend time with him. She’s one of his closest friends, maybe his best friend now that Glenn is fucking gone, but she’s not a girl. She’s safe.

He realizes he’s allowed silence, so he breaks it. His voice is barely above a whisper. “Did you see she got bangs over the summer? Cute, right?” Sylvain does not think it’s cute, in fact. Cute is Felix’s snoring, barely loud enough to actually count as such, but if Sylvain ever let that one loose he’d get more than the practiced glare of Felix Fraldarius. Felix’s eyes are a searing amber where Glenn’s had been the blue of lake water under ice. Only one had survived the accident. In the dark, when he was alone, Sylvain sometimes wondered whether the other one was out there somewhere in the brush by the ess-curve that had destroyed the Blaiddyds’ Q7 and spiderwebbed out to ruin everything else.

“I suppose,” Dimitri says. Right, Ingrid. She’d be furious if she knew Sylvain and Dimitri were talking about her. If Felix were awake he’d tell them both to shut up and sleep. Felix loves Ingrid, loves her the way siblings love each other, where anyone else hurting them is unacceptable, possessive over their pain. It’s why he’s the first to cuff her on the back of the head when she says something he disagrees with, like the endearing version of Miklan.

Sylvain shakes himself. Can’t think about that one too much. It’s barely been a month since Glenn, Felix and Dimitri and Ingrid need him on an even keel right now, happy, shameless. He lies about taking up water polo to wave away some of the marks that are more difficult to hide in the warm Faerghus summer, where it’s nice everywhere south of Gautier. He’s more careful in front of Rodrigue, who’s more likely to ask the right questions. “You ever thought about what might happen if one of us starts dating Ingrid?”

Dimitri actually looks thoughtful at that, plugged into the conversation. It’s a consideration Sylvain has ruminated on once or twice before — once Ingrid was over her debilitating childhood crush on Glenn, now, of course, obliterated beyond repair, it seemed like a possibility that one of the three of them might be interested in her, that she might be interested in one of them. Dimitri clearly hasn’t thought about it before, because he’s a normal person that doesn’t spend his time idly spinning out scenarios where the group of the best friends he has collapses on itself or perishes in a fiery explosion. Not like Sylvain, then. “I suppose nothing would really be different,” Dimitri says finally, dripping with naïveté. It’s endearing, right up until he continues, “Unless, of course, it were you.”

“Okay,” Sylvain says, actually taken aback, “what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Simply that it might be… difficult to be as we are after you finish,” Dimitri clarifies. His voice isn’t strained at all, like he’s telling a truth so obvious there’s no need to hand-wring over it. “You are not exactly known for your relationship skills.”

Yeah, true — he’s fifteen but half the girls at the Garreg Mach Middle School and a steadily increasing percentage of the students at Officer’s Academy High have a romantic entanglement with Sylvain to cry to their friends about. It doesn’t make it hurt less to hear it though, from Dimitri of all people. “It would be different with Ingrid,” he argues, not exactly a lie, but the difference is that Ingrid is a void into which attraction, Sylvain’s attraction at least, goes to die. Sylvain likes girls, simple as the color of the sky, and has experimented enough to know he likes guys just fine too. Bisexual, he might say when he’s a little older. But Ingrid just doesn’t stir any of that.

“Let us hope it does not come to that.” Dimitri rolls over again onto his back but his eyes are still reflecting the light from the window, mirroring the clouds rolling past the stars.

“With any of you,” Sylvain says, not sure exactly why he’s still defending himself from an assumption that, frankly, is based on a significant amount of proof positive, “it would be different. I would never hurt you guys.”

Dimitri shakes his head, back and forth against the pillow, and Sylvain realizes he’s said something wrong even if he doesn’t know what or why. “You can’t guarantee that,” he says, and his voice has been quiet throughout the conversation but now it’s soft too. Dimitri isn’t necessarily a soft kid but he’s polite and he’s tender and he’s probably going to be tall if his father was anything to go by and fuck if he isn’t a good friend, the best friend, and Sylvain would do anything to be able to, in fact, guarantee he’d never hurt a hair on that blond head. “Even when someone isn’t around, they are still capable of hurting you.”

Sylvain has to choke down a laugh. Even this isn’t about him at all. Felix twitches in his sleep. Why the hell the two people plagued by the most nightmares in Faerghus decided suddenly they couldn’t sleep anywhere but squarely next to each other in a bed heavy with the weight of a ghost is anyone’s guess. “Wake me up if Felix starts bothering you with all that moving around he does,” Sylvain says, rolling over to stare up at his own patch of ceiling. “I’ll switch with you.”

“I will,” Dimitri lies. He won’t. He’ll lay there consumed silently by his own unspoken misery, letting Felix press elbows to his ribs and kneecaps to his own vulnerable bones, always somehow laying on his hair in such a way that it tugs at his scalp any time either of them move, and the three of them will wake in the morning hardly rested and varying degrees of uncomfortable. Still, it’s a comforting fabrication, and at least now he knows the option is there should some power possess him to actually behave in a way that makes sense. “Good night, Sylvain.”

//

Sylvain has to thank his parents for the car they got him for his sixteenth birthday, still going strong more than a year later as he fumbles for the first name on his Favorites list. It’s alphabetical, he thinks with his foot lead on the brake at the red light, tapping his other hand on the steering wheel, watching meaningless non-patterns of car colors pass his windshield. Whoops.

“Sylvain?” The voice on the other end is foggy, even though it only took two rings to answer. Tired but not sleeping. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Hey, Dimitri, sorry about that. I know it’s late. Anyway, can I come over?” He’s talking fast, too fast maybe, fast enough that even a half-awake Dimitri will know something is up. The light turns and his foot moves, mechanically, to press the gas.

He’s silent for a moment. Maybe he fell asleep after all. Then, quietly and still smogged, “You know I’m not living at Felix’s anymore.”

Sylvain does know that, in fact, has known since the day Dimitri moved and Felix called him, didn’t say anything, just breathed into the phone long enough that Sylvain came over, stayed the night in Dimitri’s spot in Glenn’s bed, left in the morning when Felix was done being vulnerable and lonely, at least openly. Anyway. “Yeah, I remember. You think your uncle will mind? I can call Ingrid or Felix instead if you think—”

“No, of course that’s not necessary,” Dimitri says, hurriedly, like he’s throwing himself on the altar so their other friends won’t have to be woken up in the middle of the night by the fourth, most selfish member of their quartet. Sylvain tries not to let that knife sink too deeply into everything else going on in his head right now. He blinks. He’s at a red light, stopped thank the goddess. “Uncle Rufus is sleeping, but I can let you in.”

“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” And he does, shaking hands and all. “I’m, uh, already on my way so I should be there in like… ten minutes.”

He can almost see Dimitri’s eyebrows raising, disappearing under that hanging fringe in the quiet moment that follows. “I see. See you soon then, Sylvain.”

“Yup!” He’s too cheerful, tapping the screen frantically until his index finger finds the End Call button in the cupholder where his phone is propped on speaker. He doesn’t know when or why he started towards Dimitri’s uncle’s house, before he’d even made the call maybe, but it works out because he’s actually a little less than ten minutes away and he thinks if he doesn’t see another person, one without red hair and with eyes warm and lacking malice, he’s going to snap.

Dimitri is sitting on the doorstep when Sylvain pulls, unfortunately haphazard, into the spot outside Rufus Blaiddyd’s craftsman. Rumor has it that he’s still locked in red tape and bureaucracy sorting through Lambert’s will, figuring out what happens to the Blaiddyd generational property. Sylvain, sitting in front of his Playstation or Felix’s Xbox or Dimitri’s Playstation or Xbox because he’d insisted on having one of each rather than choosing one friend over the other, hears words like “power of attorney” and “executor” and “notarized”. Ingrid’s parents don’t talk about it, they have some kind of weird deference to the memory of the Blaiddyds, more importantly of Glenn, like talking money and gossip is too crass for the ones they’ve lost. Sylvain gets out of the car before he can think too much about what it means that his own parents don’t seem to really care who hears them discussing it.

“Hey!” he says, loud as calling in the quiet of the night. The lights in Dimitri’s uncle’s windows are all extinguished. Mosquitos and moths congregate around the flickering bulb on the porch, harsh compared to the rest of the neighborhood, whose lamps are mostly out. It is — Sylvain looks at his phone — after midnight. On a Tuesday. Thank the goddess it’s the muggy end of the Blue Sea Moon. Dimitri waves, small and smiling a little. He’s in a t-shirt and boxers that look like they might have come in a matched set, tied in a wide and innocuous silk ribbon, like a gift from someone in your family who doesn’t know you very well, like maybe an uncle who offers to take you in after your family dies in a car accident and wants his house to feel at least a little welcoming without putting in too much effort. The sight of him is like a literal cool drink of water, down Sylvain’s parched throat with a little slipping into his lungs, tightening his chest. He stops when he’s at the base of the stairs where Dimitri is sitting, looking down at him, puts his hands in his pockets to press the lock button on his keyring and leaves them there even after the half-beep gently splits the night. Dimitri’s eyes ask a question Sylvain isn’t sure he’s ready to answer, but they ask it earnestly and his heart is slowing in their wake.

“Hello, Sylvain,” Dimitri says. “Shall we go inside? It is less hot in there.”

Sylvain nods. “Cool,” he says, and follows Dimitri in, to the living room couch where Dimitri sits, leaving an obvious and comforting space for Sylvain at his side. It’s strange in this house, not like Felix’s where Dimitri was until a few months ago, sitting next to him doesn’t trigger the same muscle memory as the Fraldarius’ half-collapsed old leather sofa rubbed to a different color under dozens of Smash tournaments and sleepover pizza parties and dates of varying success from when Rodrigue was brave or energetic enough for that. But Dimitri is familiar, intimately so, looking patient and open and maybe a little worried up at him. The living room is dark except for the pinpricks of the electronics’ status lights and the streetlights from outside, mitigated by the curtains over the windows. Sylvain takes a breath to consider which is worse — Dimitri asking him or Sylvain just coming out and saying it, and the idea of hearing Dimitri’s gentle voice in addition to being fixed by his gentle gaze wins out. “So,” he says, and something changes in the line of Dimitri's jaw that makes Sylvain think he spoke just in time, “my parents kicked Miklan out.”

Blond brows converge nearly at the center of Dimitri’s forehead, concern and confusion writ plain across his face. “Your parents?” he repeats, as if that is the meat of Sylvain’s sentence.

“Yeah,” he says. “Who else?”

“What happened?” Dimitri asks then, like it had taken a moment for the situation to settle in. It is, Sylvain reminds himself, after midnight, and Dimitri has been sitting on his uncle’s humid front porch for at least a few minutes. Before that he was probably lying in his uncle’s humid guest bedroom, awake, wishing he wasn’t. Not that Sylvain really knows — the Dimitri of now has a level to him that Sylvain hasn’t reached yet, dark and descending and obscured by fog.

So. What happened. “I don’t know how it started,” Sylvain explains. “I was at work until like 9:00, then I went over to Hilda’s for a while.” This is code for “I hooked up with Hilda”, but Dimitri still doesn’t seem to speak that language so he just nods solemnly, mouth pressed into a single concerned line like it’s under an iron. “By the time I got back it was loud enough that I could hear it from the driveway. Miklan heard me come in, I wasn’t quiet enough, so I got dragged into it.” He huffs a laugh like a shade between himself and Dimitri’s earnest worry. Family stuff, he would never say out loud, derisively, to a kid with no family except an uncle who’s half a stranger and half a suspected gold digger shoveling into his own brother’s grave.

“Sylvain,” Dimitri says then, waving away the deflection like vapor, the way he sometimes used to out by the Fraldarius’ dock when Sylvain would smoke a furtive cigarette he’d managed to steal from Miklan in front of his young and impressionable friends. Dimitri never bought it, like he’s not buying it now. “Don’t just… push this aside.”

You’re one to talk, Sylvain might say instead of the nervous chuckle he offers, if Dimitri wasn’t his friend, if he wasn’t always so fucking scared he might wake up one day with the three of them lost, just Miklan and his ice cold parents left and now not even Miklan anymore. That pulls a shaking breath from him, like a tooth from a socket. “I mean,” he shifts on the couch, “there’s nothing really to brush aside. Miklan’s gone now, packed up and left after he yelled himself hoarse.” He pauses. His fingers are shaking on the tops of his thighs where his palms press like the weight might keep him tethered. “He hit me, you know.”

This is something Sylvain hasn’t told them, not as a group. He had to tell Felix when he forgot how damn observant the kid was and visited one too many times in a row with a horseplay-inhibiting injury. Ingrid is still in the dark, he’s thought about telling her a hundred times, thought she might figure it out a thousand times over that, but after Glenn it’s never the right time anymore. Glenn died without knowing, thank the goddess for Felix being a better friend than Sylvain could ever hope to deserve. Dimitri, though. Sylvain watches him take that in, watches his brow start to furrow again before the implication, the timeline, of Sylvain’s sentence stretches out in front of him and his eyes go wide. “He—” Dimitri swallows, “he hit you tonight?”

“Weirdly,” Sylvain says, like he’s talking about his parents’ fridge not making crushed ice anymore for a month and then suddenly starting up again, “no. Other times though. So, yeah, I’m not really upset he’s gone.”

“Then,” Dimitri says, slow, unbearably kind and soft, “why are you here, Sylvain?”

The question that would sound like a knife from Ingrid or Felix is tender from Dimitri, searching. Because, the cold and tamped down part of Sylvain offers silently, fourteen years ago and change your sweet sweet mom and dad decided to name you Dimitri, like you were born into some kind of War and Peace sequel project. You could have been Lambert, after your father, could have been Loog after the stories predating even Tolstoy, and then Felix would have been the one to deal with this shit. But that’s not really the question, is it? _Why_ are you here, not why are you _here_?

“I don’t know,” Sylvain says finally. He runs a shaking hand through his hair, and Dimitri’s blue eyes shine in the moonlight as they follow it. He looks like a kid in a clothing spread for a teen magazine or something, boxed-set pajamas and all. It’s unfair. “I guess I just… figured someone else should know. Or I didn’t want you to be surprised when everything spreads around.”

Dimitri nods then, deliberately, like he understands a lot more than what Sylvain just said. “Things have a way of doing that here, yes,” he agrees, knowingly. _The Duscur Tragedy_ , the news had called it at the time, the accident that killed Dimitri’s father and his stepmother and Felix’s brother and most of the family in the other car — the Molinaros. Like a dandelion snaking between slabs of sidewalk, the friendship between Dimitri and Dedue, the only other survivor of the crash, had grown like a weed. On that note…

“Is Dedue here?” Sylvain asks. It’s out of nowhere, he realizes when Dimitri’s brows draw together again. His train of thought hadn’t been out loud, of course, but his face clears quickly, wiping to sheepishness.

“He is, as a matter of fact,” Dimitri replies. “My uncle has been kind enough to let him stay on the pullout in the guest room, just while I settle in.”

“Right,” Sylvain says, creeping feeling of intrusion sliding like cold spit down his spine. It could be because Dimitri still thinks he’s _settling in_ after multiple months living with Rufus. It could be because Dedue is filling a slot that Sylvain has always felt is comfortably his in their group. “That makes sense. Look, I’m really sorry to bother you with all this stuff, tell Dedue I’m sorry too—”

“Nonsense.” Dimitri’s voice is still low but louder than it’s been all night, stopping Sylvain in his tracks where he’s half-risen from the couch. Like Dimitri is a king instead of his younger friend, Sylvain sits back down, slow and careful, like any movement might put him on a landmine. “Sylvain, I won’t have you going back to… back to that house.” He pauses, like he’s steeling himself. “Those people.”

Dimitri’s teeth are gritted. Felix has been talking lately about how something frightening is inside Dimitri but this might be the first time Sylvain believes him about it.

“I don’t have to,” Sylvain says. “I can drive around. I could go back to Hilda’s.” He can’t, really, that’s not how whatever they have going on works, but it’s reasonable enough and Dimitri doesn’t need the details.

“Of course not,” Dimitri says, and it’s a command. “You’re staying here. My uncle does not have an extra bed that I know of but I will make up the couch. You can borrow something more appropriate to sleep in from me.”

Sylvain takes stock of himself at that. The t-shirt that still smells like Hilda’s sweet and floral perfume is probably fine but the jeans are going to be uncomfortable come morning. Suddenly he’s tired. He nods. “Yeah, okay Dimitri,” he says, a concession of sorts. “Thanks. You’re sure old Uncle Rufus isn’t gonna mind?”

“Fair warning,” Dimitri says as he rises, up to get sheets and shorts from the depths of the only other living Blaiddyd’s residence, “he may be surprised to find you here in the morning. But it isn’t as though he does not know you.”

“Thanks,” Sylvain says again, and even though the sheets have the feeling of bedding unused with any recency, and even though the gym shorts emblazoned with the name of Dimitri’s fancy and short-lived boarding school dig into Sylvain’s hips a bit, he sleeps better than he thinks he might have anywhere else.

//

“Sylvain,” Dimitri sighs, and there’s an edge of resignation in his voice that Sylvain has been expecting for at least an hour at this point, “I do not think I will ever understand this.”

Had Ingrid and Felix mocked Sylvain mercilessly for majoring in Poly Sci, just like his father wanted, even though Sylvain still insists it’s a chance to effect change in the Gautier dynasty from the inside out? Yes. Had Dimitri followed him right into that major after the repercussions of the Tragedy of Duscur had spiraled into widespread prejudice against people from Dedue’s homeland, to a similarly difficult end? Also yes.

Is the outcome of that chain of events Dimitri and Sylvain on the floor of his living room jointly prepping for Dimitri’s Intro to Comparative Politics final? So it would seem.

“Is it still the authoritarian stuff?” Sylvain asks, shifting his weight. One of his feet is falling asleep, he’s sure of it, but he still has a complete soft spot for Dimitri even after all this time, especially maybe. “When we went over it earlier it seemed like you were really getting it.”

“It’s just…” Dimitri trails off, scrubbing a hand over those blue eyes, brighter than sapphires, and Sylvain looks up at him from the flashcards he’s been carefully lettering, making pleasing to the eye for some reason he doesn’t actually want to think about. “It’s everything about it. I don’t think I shall ever learn this.”

That’s when Sylvain really sees him for the first time in a few hours, really looks at him. Dimitri looks young, he’s younger than Sylvain anyway, sure, but he looks at once more youthful and more aged than any nineteen-year-old has the right or the burden to be. It’s the weight of lost family, the dragging down of gravity that Sylvain feels the pull of too, the will and the need to be better than the ones who came before you. It’s something like a shared goal among the four of them, the childhood friends Sylvain hasn’t managed to drive away, Felix and Ingrid feeling and dealing with it in their own ways too. Dimitri and Sylvain have just somehow ended up on the exact same path.

“Hey,” Sylvain says to the backs of Dimitri’s hands, “look at me.” And he does, blue eyes peeking over white-knuckled fingers. “Even if you fail this test no amount of knowledge is gonna make you as successful as who you are will. It sounds stupid,” he adds, when Dimitri’s brow furrows, “but it’s true. It literally doesn’t matter what you know or don’t know. The kind of things that matter in this field are who you are and how you act. I’m gonna help you pass your final but just know that I don’t think the world is gonna give a shit how you did in fucking first year Comparative. They’re gonna care that you’re Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, and they’re gonna care who you’re helping and who you’re putting pressure on and who you’re smiling with in press photos and what you’re doing in your down time. And you can’t study for any of that.”

Dimitri frowns. His hands are still covering his mouth so Sylvain has to intuit the expression by the wrinkles on his forehead and under his eyes. “If you are trying to… er, boost my confidence, I am afraid it is not working,” he says in that grown-up voice of his, the kind that shoots right through Sylvain like an arrow, same as the early greys at Felix’s teen temples, same as the bags permanently lugged around above Ingrid’s cheekbones. The signs of his own aging he barely notices. “I am far better at studying than at… at being a person.”

And that’s the root of it, isn’t it? The twisted origin of half the things between them, the strife to be normal against the unending sweeping tides of their history ebbing and flowing over everything else. Right now, it means not giving up on this stupid class. Dimitri has it with von Essar, same as Sylvain, which means it’s easy as long as you’re on his good side, and sure it’s the end of the semester but Sylvain knows that’s not too late. And really, what better way to prepare for what’s ahead? “Sure you are,” Sylvain says. “Sure you are. I’ll help you study and then I’ll help you be a person.”

Dimitri’s eyes looking at Sylvain are bluer than the sky, bluer than sapphires, bluer than an entire ocean’s worth of the color and the unabashed gratitude swimming in them is overwhelming. Dimitri is always painfully earnest, a perfect hard counter to the artificiality of everything Sylvain has had to make himself. “Do you mean it?” he asks, breathless as anything. It’s disarming.

“Yeah,” Sylvain says before he can think about it. “Yeah, of course I mean it. I’m not leaving this apartment until you’re going to pass.”

Dimitri’s brow furrows then. “This is your apartment,” he says.

“Okay.” Sylvain does not stammer. “Then… then I guess you’re the one who’s not leaving.” It’s as easy as that to convince him, and as ordered Dimitri sits at the coffee table long enough for Ashe and Marianne to make their ways home, shy smiles and waves for Dimitri and pleas for Sylvain not to be too loud. As if.

It gets late quickly, like Sylvain blinks once and then it’s night, or morning, and it’s dark out and he and Dimitri are both still squinting at their laptops like their lives depend on it. He sighs just in time for Dimitri’s chin to slump from his hand, jerking him back to wakefulness.

“Get some rest,” Sylvain says before Dimitri can protest, or apologize, or any of the other communication forms stuck in the back of his throat. He rubs the heels of his palms over those blue eyes, looking physically weighed down by the exhaustion. “How are you feeling about it?”

Dimitri frowns, deeply, setting his hands primly back in his lap. “To be honest,” he admits, “very little closer than before. I am still concerned.”

“Then you’re staying here tonight,” Sylvain announces. Dimitri’s already looking at him but his gaze sharpens, brow furrowing. “I said you weren’t leaving until you’re gonna pass. Tomorrow’s Sunday, if you’re already here you won’t have far to go to get studying with me again in the morning. Or,” he adds, glancing at the clock in the corner of his laptop screen, “like, maybe afternoon.”

“Sylvain, I—”

Sylvain waves his hand dismissively. “None of your _that is far too generous_ bullshit, dude,” he says, and Dimitri cracks a very small smile at his imitation. “I’ll grab you something to sleep in, since you decided to suddenly be, like, almost exactly my height all of a sudden, and you can shower now or when you wake up, doesn’t matter to me.”

“You are too kind,” Dimitri says, and it really sounds a little too like _I don’t deserve this_ for Sylvain’s comfort. He stands, knee or spine popping a little as he does, and moves to the couch, taking one of the house-shared throw blankets off the back.

“Dude,” Sylvain says, voice serious enough somehow to stop Dimitri in his tracks, “sleep in my bed. It’s gonna be a lot less weird for Ashe and Marianne if it’s me out on the couch.” Dimitri frowns. “I mean it. I’m a bad enough housemate as it is without one of my guests scaring them half to death.” He winks then. Dimitri can be sensitive about that kind of thing. “Even if it’s you.”

He can already see him relenting, the bags under his eyes triumphant over the stiff Blaiddyd politeness, the Faerghus politeness really. Sylvain has stamped it thoroughly out but there’s self-sacrifice remaining in the smoldering embers. “All right,” Dimitri says finally, when the war is over for the moment. “Thank you, Sylvain.”

The couch is less comfortable than Sylvain remembers as he settles himself under the blanket, squirming fruitlessly to find a good angle in the dark, trying to forget the memory of something in his brain stirring at the sight of Dimitri sitting on his bed, wearing a pair of his shorts, smiling up at him like someone out of a fairytale.

//

Felix and Ingrid leave Fhirdiad. Sylvain and Dimitri stay there. They’ve known it would happen, consciously or subconsciously, for as long as they’ve been alive. It’s the way of things. Felix runs, Ingrid forges new paths, Dimitri and Sylvain try to bloom, or at least not to wither and die, where they’re planted.

Nowhere in that schema is Dimitri getting hit upside the head so hard as an innocent bystander to a bar fight that Sylvain is sitting in the waiting room at the Martritz General ER, shaking hands and bouncing leg. Sylvain hadn’t brought Dimitri to the bar, they’d both gone with Ashe to support Abyss’ first real show, but the guilt feels like his own nonetheless. Ashe had been bawling at the club, too upset to go anywhere but home with Dedue, and Sylvain had been too afraid to let Dimitri go anywhere without him. It feels like it’s been hours. If Sylvain had had a buzz when Hapi had grinned from the stage at them and waved, he’s stone sober now.

A familiar-looking person in scrubs, unclear to Sylvain’s somewhat unfocused brain whether they’re a nurse or a doctor or something else, pushes through the double doors to the mysterious and so far inaccessible patient region where Dimitri had been urgently dragged to and Sylvain forcibly held back from. He knows it was something with his eye; Dimitri hadn’t let him see it the entirety of the way here, covering it with both hands, pale and panting, groaning any time they hit a stoplight too abruptly.

“Are you Sylvain?” the scrubbed person asks. He has lank green hair half back in a bun and he looks too tired to be effective, but Sylvain supposes it is the middle of the night.

“Yeah?” he replies, like it’s a question. His voice splits down the middle as he practically jumps out of his chair. “Was Dimitri—”

“Yeah, he’s gonna need your help getting home.” He has a name badge. Linhardt. Even in the photo his eyes are half-lidded with sleep. “He’s been out of surgery long enough to wake up but the anesthetic packs a hell of a punch. You understand.”

“Surgery?” Sylvain repeats. The syllables mean something, he knows that, he just can’t wrap his head around it.

Linhardt frowns at him. So, strong points for him so far do not include bedside manner or general interest. “Yes. His eye was irreparably damaged. We had to remove it. He’s quite all right otherwise though, all things considered. Whoever glassed him missed the important things.”

“You mean like his fucking eye?” Sylvain rationally understands that Linhardt, whoever he is, is just doing his job, maybe after a long day of dealing with other clinical staff and patients and long lines at the cafeteria up the hall for bad coffee and bruised fruit and a TV playing the news too loudly to actually be understood, but he also is starting to rationally understand that his friend is behind those double doors down an entire fucking eye. “That’s pretty important.”

“Spoken like someone without a big picture understanding of the human body,” Linhardt says. He’s already turning away. “Follow me. Your friend is in Room Three on the right. He’ll get his AVS on his phone, we’ve walked through the big stuff with him. You can review it with him again when he’s home and more lucid, yes?”

“Is this, like, standard procedure?” Sylvain asks, jogging behind Linhardt like there’s some way he could beat him through those swinging wood and glass barriers. “Just letting him go?”

Linhardt doesn’t deign to respond to that. He presses his tap badge to the pad next to the doors, letting them whir open rather than just pushing which so far seems very typical of him, and says, “Have a good night.”

Sylvain is on his own, staring after the back of Linhardt’s head for a moment, before he’s glancing up at the signage and veering the correct right turn for room three. Dimitri is sitting up when he enters, which Sylvain thinks for a glowing moment is a positive sign, but then he catches sight of the white wind of gauze between golden hair and the top of his ear and everything good is gone from him again.

“Hey, bud,” Sylvain says, and Dimitri turns to look at him, and even with all of the mess of blood and bruising and more of that cottony cobwebbing the first thing his eyes go to is that smile, small but mightier than anything Sylvain has seen in all twenty-three years he’s been on earth.

“Sylvain,” Dimitri says, and at the whimper in his voice something inside Sylvain snaps and melts and bursts all at once and he’s crossing the room, on his knees in front of Dimitri, arms going around his waist and cheek pressing to his stomach. It’s embarrassing, he thinks dimly for a moment, for anyone to see him like this as they pass the vaguely curtained entryway to the room, but then Dimitri’s chin hits the top of his head and Dimitri’s fingers twist themselves into fists in Sylvain’s shirt, and everything except the person under him and in front of him and around him leaves his mind.

That takes a minute. Then looking over Dimitri’s face, letting himself see he’s groggy but alive and otherwise sound, takes another few minutes, Sylvain’s fingers lingering guilelessly over his cheeks below where the bones carve under his eyes, Dimitri flushing under him, charming as shit even with one less organ.

Sylvain helps him out of bed, arm around his back to settle his hand sturdily under his ribs, and he leads him out to his car, and he drives him to his house. Dimitri hands him his keys, wearily, and lets Sylvain unlock the door and leave the lights off and take him to his bedroom.

It’s another few minutes to get Dimitri’s phone unlocked, to read the instructions for the pills that the, in Sylvain’s humble and unprofessional opinion, more competent doctor who had stopped in to see Dimitri before they’d left had given him. Another to get a glass from Dimitri’s cabinet and fill it with water and bring it and two of the little capsules back to the bedroom where Dimitri is sitting, listlessly, right where Sylvain had left him.

“Here,” Sylvain says, holding out the pills, and Dimitri reaches for them and misses his hand completely, and Sylvain’s heart crumbles. Dimitri doesn’t bother trying again, just looks at him and with one eye conveys all the despair and fear and raw vulnerability that two could ever have expressed. “Never mind, I’ve got you.”

Sylvain sets the glass on the table and lifts his free hand to Dimitri’s chin, nudging his mouth open with the pressure of his thumb against his jaw, and places the capsules on his tongue. Then it’s just grabbing Dimitri’s hand, wrapping it around the glass, and guiding the water up to meet his still-open mouth. He tilts it, tips his head back, swallows, lets Sylvain help him set it back down, all the while that bright eye follows his own movements, studying his new weakness.

“I’ll stay here tonight, if you’re okay with it,” Sylvain says, after a minute or two of sitting in silence. “Just holler if you need me to pick anything up for you.”

“Sylvain,” Dimitri says, again, and he realizes it’s the only thing he’s said since this all started unfathomably many hours ago. Just Sylvain’s name. He sighs. “You… you do not have to.”

“I know,” Sylvain agrees. “That’s why I want to.”

“I can call Dedue,” Dimitri protests, feebly. The eyelid Sylvain can see is dropping minutely.

“Nah,” Sylvain says. “I texted him and Ashe earlier. Hapi knows too. They’ll be over whenever you want to see them but tonight they’re probably asleep already.”

Dimitri fixes him with that gaze, almost more intense now that it’s concentrated into one point, exhaustion and all. “You’re not asleep,” he says, slowly.

“No, sir.”

“Why?” Like that’s any kind of question. Sylvain is crouched in front of him at this point. It’s easy to set a hand on his thigh, it’s harder to keep from squeezing, feeling the living muscle and the still-pumping blood deeply under his fingers, beating a tattoo of resilience against him. Maybe Linhardt had made one good point earlier.

“I’d do anything for you, dude,” Sylvain says, and there’s a tightness settling in his lungs that tells him he means it. He means it for all his friends but looking up at Dimitri there’s a part of him that means it more.

Dimitri looks away again. “I am sorry,” he says suddenly, covering the uninjured side of his face with his hand. “I… if it is difficult to see me like this.”

“I mean, yeah, I hate seeing you hurt,” Sylvain says, understatement of the century, it feels like the myelin around his every nerve is boiling at the sight of it, “but you’re still just as easy to look at as ever. Don’t even worry.” Without examining that too deeply, he pushes back to his feet, hands to Dimitri’s shoulders now. It’s getting oddly difficult to not touch him. “Now, come on, let’s get you out of these and into something you might have a shot in hell of sleeping in. I still have to make that stupid half-broken pullout of yours into something worth lying on.”

Dimitri frowns. “You do not have to sleep out there,” he says, but then the frown turns to his barely big enough for him bed and he seems to reconsider. “On second thought, it may be more comfortable for you.”

“I’m still in earshot,” Sylvain soothes, unbuttoning Dimitri’s shirt slowly, trying not to stare too much at the pallor he’s exposing, the nevertheless living skin beneath the fabric. It’s lonely on the pullout, he has to admit later when he’s tossing there under a blanket with some kind of cartoon horse that he suspects is a gift from Marianne, but it’s enough to hear Dimitri’s shuffling, to know he’s close enough to come running if there’s anything he needs.

Sylvain stares at the ceiling he can’t see in the darkness of Dimitri’s spartan living room and realizes he has it bad.

//

It’s not like Sylvain tries to distance himself from Dimitri after the bar fight. In fact it’s sort of the opposite. He’d been there during the second biggest tragedy of Dimitri’s life, and it brings them a little together, he supposes. On one hand, Sylvain would rather die than reject Dimitri, than make him think he anything less than loves him. On the other hand, it’s getting more and more difficult to be around him without acting like a damn fool. Seeing Dimitri smiling again, seeing him adjust his eyepatch with that shy little flush on his face, hair half pulled back and bangs falling over his forehead, Sylvain feels his traitorous heart clenching in want at what he knows he’s never gonna have, never going to deserve. It hurts anyway.

But it does mean that eight years to the day after Miklan was sent packing, when Dimitri is a green recruit at a policy research center and Sylvain is a hardened three-year veteran of the business development branch of Gautier Industries, Sylvain is sitting at a bar he doesn’t remember the name of, unlocking his cell phone and opening his contacts.

It’s not that he’s so drunk, because he really isn’t, just enough that he’s actually letting himself feel something honestly for once. Maybe a few things. All the miserable tangled knots of Miklan are colliding with all the things he’s been thinking about Dimitri lately, things like how much he likes seeing him, how much he wants to kiss him, how much he’s on his mind in general. It’s a little pathetic, a little nauseating. Sylvain knows this.

“Just call them.”

The bartender is a tall tough-looking redhead, a quiver of inked arrows poking out above the collar of her shirt. She’s wiry and muscled and if Sylvain were a little younger and a little less sure of what he wanted he might have tried, futilely he guesses, to get her number. She looks done with his shit, the same as he’s done with his second whiskey and soda. Two is enough, one for him and one for Miklan, or for the road, or for Dimitri or whatever, and he leaves a good tip when he closes his tab.

He does call. Dimitri’s name is still at the top of the alphabetical list of his favorites, right above Dorothea, hypothetically under Ashe if Sylvain ever feels they’re close enough to tap that star. That would mean Dimitri wouldn’t be first. Maybe that would help somehow.

“Sylvain!” His voice over the line sounds happy. Sylvain feels a very nasty warmth spreading in his chest. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hey,” Sylvain says, and even to him, under the awning of the bar (Blade Breaker II, the sign reads, and he wonders how he managed to forget a name like that), he sounds awfully fond. “I was… don’t think I’m weird, but I was wondering if I could come over.”

Where this idea is coming from Sylvain has no idea. He’s letting that newly unbound heart lead him around.

“Of course.” Dimitri’s tone turns more serious. “Is everything all right?”

“Totally.” It is. His hands are not shaking. “I just, uh. You know. I just wanted to see you. Figured we could hang out.”

“Sure,” Dimitri says. There’s a pause. “It… is a little late.”

Sylvain looks at the clock on his phone. It is a little late, actually, but not late enough that either of them will care other than the fact that it’s unusual to want to come over just to hang out when there are that many digits in the time. “Nothing weird, promise,” he says. He’s only just starting to feel a prickle of nerves but he pushes it down. “See you soon? I just have to figure out where the hell I ended up compared to where your place is.”

“Are you sure everything is all right?” Dimitri asks again. “I can pick you up if you—”

“I’m good,” Sylvain mostly lies. He’s already figured out by the nearest street signs where his steps had brought him when he’d left his apartment in a half-manic haze, when the walls of his own place just seemed to be plastered with Miklan’s leering face. Outside at least he could get away from him. “See you!”

It is soon when Sylvain arrives on the doorstep of Dimitri’s apartment, texting him to save his neighbors one buzz of the door. He had walked, to give himself time not to panic, to force himself to think it all through, and it had not helped at all. Oh, well.

Dimitri opens the door cautiously, but relief spreads over his face when he sees Sylvain alive and in one piece, if not necessarily well, but Sylvain has a feeling that all will come out in the end anyway. It’s amazing to see Dimitri, like it always is, like he’s the sun rising over the Oghma Mountains in the morning. Sylvain grins. “Hello,” Dimitri says, stepping aside to let him in, locking the door behind him.

“Hey yourself,” Sylvain replies. That’s the easy part out of the way. “Would you believe me if I said I missed you?”

“Sylvain,” Dimitri says, looking down and away, a little pink creeping along his cheekbones that makes Sylvain want to dig his fingers in and follow it, “enough of your teasing.”

“I’d never tease you,” he fibs easily, but drifts into the truth. “I was sitting at some weird bar thinking about you, and then I figured I’d just come see you instead of moping about it. Even the bartender was sick of me.”

Dimitri frowns, head back up again to catch Sylvain’s eyes. “Are you absolutely sure everything is all right? You seem…”

Right. Sylvain seems like a lot of things. “Honestly, it’s been kind of a weird day,” he admits, “but for real, seeing you I’m already better. You’re a panacea.”

Dimitri glances at his watch, recognizes something on the screen, and then looks back at Sylvain with a new cast of understanding in his eye. “It’s Miklan,” he says with conviction. There’s no point in Sylvain denying it, so he nods. “Of course you would be upset. I am sorry, I lost track of the date.”

Sylvain gets it. There’s only so many dates you can hold in your head at once and Dimitri already has a slew of those. “No problem,” he says. “I wasn’t kidding, it’s better just not being alone.”

“Being here,” Dimitri confirms, and Sylvain nods. “Very well.”

There’s a strange silence. It feels like air before a thunderstorm, heavy and charged with something Sylvain can’t understand, or rather something that he understands deep down into his bones, deep enough to scare him and make him want to forget just how heavy that understanding is.

“Look, Dimitri, I—”

“Stay here,” Dimitri interrupts him. He looks preternaturally handsome in the light of the cheap overhead light in his entryway. Sylvain feels his mouth go dry. “Tonight, I mean. You’re upset and I don’t want you to be alone.”

“I could call Felix,” Sylvain protests, weak. He already did call Felix, actually, same as he does every year on this day, first thing in the morning to get the initial rolling anger out. Felix is good for that. The friends who work out their brother hang-ups together stay together, or whatever people say.

“You already talked to Felix,” Dimitri dismisses him, because, right, he does every year. “We don’t have to discuss anything, we can just… spend time together. I can be a person.” He smiles a little. Sylvain’s heart feels like a balloon full to bursting.

“You’re the best person, dude,” he says, without really thinking about it. Dimitri smiles bigger. He has these little wrinkles he gets around his eyes when he does that, stamped into Sylvain’s mind like an embossing. “I can stay if you want me to.”

They settle on Dimitri’s couch, in the living room where to the chagrin of the entire area code he still doesn’t have an actual TV, so they’re reduced to hunching over his laptop watching whatever ludicrously plotless action movie they find first. Sylvain thinks it might have been one of the early ones in Manuela Casagranda’s career but, gun to his head, couldn’t have told you the title. Or anything about it, really, once Dimitri is close enough to him that their legs are touching, once halfway through the movie he looks at Sylvain for a moment and slowly puts an arm around his shoulders, squeezes him once and then never really lets go, and it’s just like that, safe and heart thudding under him, that Sylvain’s threadbare mind finally shuts off enough to sleep.

//

Sylvain wakes with a crick in his neck to mostly darkness. Dimitri’s laptop is auto-playing something that he’s fairly certain isn’t part of the movie that was on earlier.

“Hi,” the man himself says, and as he shifts Sylvain determines the source of the pain in his spine — Dimitri’s arm is still firmly around him, passing between his head and the back of the couch. It’s not the worst wakeup Sylvain has ever had.

“Hey,” he replies. It’s now or never. Dimitri looks like an angel in the electronic light, and his arm is warm and strong around Sylvain, and if he doesn’t make a damn move one of any number of people is going to get to him first and the thought is filling Sylvain’s head full of quicksand. “Can I tell you something?”

“Anything,” Dimitri says with breathless earnestness.

“Cool.” Sylvain can barely look at him, he’s brighter than fire, but he braves it. “I’m… it was really nice of you to let me come over here. I always feel better about things when I’m with you. Like no matter how shitty things get we can handle it if we help each other. Maybe that’s too much.”

“No,” Dimitri counters, “not at all. I feel the same. You are a good person, Sylvain. You’re very strong.”

“You know it,” he says, winking before he can really stop himself. “But… there’s kind of something else, too.”

Dimitri is looking at him now, something remarkable and unreadable rising in his eyes like the tide. “Oh?” he asks, and his voice has that same breathy quality to it, but not in the same way as before. It’s more uncertain. Sylvain is fucked.

“Yeah.” Moment of truth. “I uh… okay. I think I have feelings for you.”

There’s a very long silence then, long enough that Sylvain gets nervous. He’s watching Dimitri like a hawk but his mouth is agape in… shock? Surprise? Disgust? Sylvain hopes at least it isn’t that but he can’t really be sure. His stomach starts to sink.

“Yeah, okay, that was stupid.” His palm touches that point on the back of his neck, the one that means _yep I fucked up_ , the one that burns with embarrassment.

But also the one that’s near enough to where Dimitri’s hand is, the one still over Sylvain’s shoulders which he honestly didn’t really think about before delivering that bombshell, that Dimitri can reach out and brush their fingers together. Which, he does. Sylvain’s gaze jumps, with pathetic and reflexive hope, back up to meet Dimitri’s.

“Do you mean it?” Dimitri asks, but he doesn’t sound like he’s really questioning it somehow. Sylvain’s voice must be giving him away. “Feelings?”

Sylvain laughs, heart rising from the pit of his stomach to soar fully back into his chest. It’s like he remembers how to breathe again. “Yeah, Dimitri. Feelings. For you.” He tightens the hold between their fingers, twining them together. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“ _I_ haven’t noticed?” Dimitri repeats. “If you think I have been missing signs then you are surely blinder than I am.” He grins. “And you have two eyes!”

“Heh, what do you mean by that?” Sylvain asks. If he’s honest, he doesn’t really care. He mostly cares about the fact that Dimitri is taking this so well, that he hasn’t run away, that he seems at least neutral to the fact that Sylvain might, or in fact does, want him as more than a friend. He also cares, deeply, about the fact that Dimitri’s mouth is still parted in that half-disbelieving smile, which makes him look just so preeminently kissable that it’s all Sylvain can do to wait.

“Sylvain,” he murmurs, and it occurs to Sylvain that a worthy pursuit might be to spend the rest of his life chasing different iterations of his name out of Dimitri’s mouth, in every setting, on every wavelength, with every accompanying emotion in his eyes, “I have been… well, let’s say I have had feelings for you, as well, for a while.”

Sylvain thinks his heart stops beating for moment, though he still hears it roaring in his ears. “Uh,” he stammers, eloquently, “really? That’s surprising.”

Dimitri frowns, and the wrinkle that shows up between his brows, right over his nose like a bad omen, seems like the single worst thing in the world to Sylvain. He doesn’t reach over to smooth it out with his finger but he sure does think about it. “Surprising how?” he asks. “You have always been there for me, you… you helped me when I was at my worst, you took care of me. You are kind and loyal and smart no matter how you’ve tried to hide it. And your face…” Dimitri blushes, like he’s realized he’s getting carried away, but Sylvain can feel an alien heat spreading across his own freckled face at the unabashed praise.

“Fuck,” he says, a word that until relatively recently in his short lifespan Dimitri would have blanched to hear. Instead the frown is wiping away, replacing itself with that smile that’s brighter than any wattage measured by the human race so far, warmer than the sun, more like home than anything Sylvain has really known. “Warn a guy before you say that kind of stuff.”

“I can say it as much as you like. And I will.” Dimitri’s arm is still tight around him. Their faces are so close. Sylvain’s usually a talker but right now there’s something more important he’d like to get to.

He knows he has to do it carefully, anything physical with Dimitri. This isn’t like the times he’s hooked up with friends before, Hilda or Dorothea or Claude. Those had all been mutually light, no stakes, no concerns about hurt feelings or things getting too serious unless they wanted it. Now it’s already serious, now it’s Dimitri who Sylvain has known since childhood, who has seen him and been seen through the worst life could possibly throw at them — hopefully. This is feelings. This is something Sylvain can’t fuck up.

It’s paralyzing.

“Sylvain,” Dimitri says again, like he’s enjoying just repeating his name, low and soft, eyes on Sylvain’s mouth, “I hope this is not too forward, but—”

“Yeah,” he agrees, breathless, before he can trap himself further in the mire of his own swirling thoughts, and he kisses him. He kisses Dimitri. Dimitri kisses him back. For a moment of complete stillness, everything is perfect.

Dimitri pulls back first, with a little gasp like Cethleann’s garland tightening right around Sylvain’s ribcage, just enough for the air to make its way to him. He’s smiling, crooked and also perfect, and his eyes flash open to meet Sylvain’s with naked thrill and want and something else that Sylvain doesn’t want to name lest he instinctively crush it in his hands. They’re close enough that their noses bump against each other, that when he speaks again their lips brush.

“Dimitri,” he murmurs, and he had something else in mind but Dimitri inhales again, responsive as hell to the change in contact, and leans in again.

Sylvain’s mouth is open this time, slotting around Dimitri’s bottom lip without even trying, deepening things just a little right from the jump. The room roars with silence, leaving nothing but the slick of their mouths against each other, the slide of Sylvain’s hands over Dimitri’s waist, up his sides, the brush of Dimitri’s fingers carefully, so carefully, over Sylvain’s ear to tangle in his hair. Sylvain lets his mouth open a touch wider, wide enough that Dimitri’s bottom lip brushes his tongue, and he’s treated to another gasp, separating them enough for a line of spit to drag between their lips.

“Too much?” Sylvain asks, throat raspy like he’s parched. He can’t look away from Dimitri’s mouth, knows he’s being a little crude about it but he can’t help it. His hand at Dimitri’s waist is gripping a little, loathe to let him go, other arm curled around his back to settle his fingers between the blades of his shoulders.

He thinks Dimitri might shake his head but he’s too close to tell, the hand at the back of Sylvain’s neck already tugging him in again, Dimitri’s mouth fully open against his now, hot and wet and welcoming. Sylvain doesn’t know if it’s actually, technically, the best kiss he’s ever had but it sure as hell feels like it when Dimitri slips his tongue into his mouth, strong and curious.

It could be seconds or hours on Dimitri’s couch, learning a new language between them, crossing the infinite bridge to settle into Dimitri’s lap, feeling new parts of their bodies brush together. Part of Sylvain never wants it to end, which is new and a little frightening, but then he hears Dimitri’s moans turning into words over his head where he’s currently occupied mouthing a line down the immaculate column of his throat.

“Sylvain,” he’s panting, hands groping up under Sylvain’s shirt, wires against his already heated skin, and he generously, torturously, pauses. Every second Sylvain isn’t learning some new thing about Dimitri’s body, his voice, feels like a waste already. When he looks up at him though he’s treated to his flushing face, his eyes hot and liquid like magma, his mouth gaped like he could open it wider and swallow the moment whole. Sylvain has it really damn bad.

“Yeah?” he asks, letting his lip catch on one stretched tendon, wringing a groan from Dimitri’s already graveled voicebox.

“Perhaps we should… take this to the bedroom.” If Dimitri’s face was pink before it’s halfway to red now, sweet bashful demureness. It’s alien and intoxicating, apparently enough to turn Sylvain’s internal monologue into a bodice-ripping romance novel.

“Yeah,” he repeats, one last kiss to Dimitri’s neck to tide him over on the long walk down the hallway. “Yeah, we should.”

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed my attempt to branch out! thank you for reading.


End file.
